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When Chika scraped her knee, it was Osamu who was upset. He immediately sacrificed his water bottle to wash the blood away, pulling out the first-aid kit he kept handy for this exact purpose.
Rinji took one look at her and asked, "Does it hurt?"
Chika shook her head, smiling.
They passed a knowing look between them, delighted in a way that was certainly a little odd. Osamu frowned as he disinfected and patched the exposed wound, but he let them be.
(At the time, he didn't get it. He didn't get them. Maybe if they had a few more summers, he might have truly understood.)
Rinji's hand on her head was the most notable memory of that day. The weight of it. The warmth. The subtle way he would stroke her hair with his thumb while they both watched Osamu fuss.
As an excuse to treat himself, Rinji suggested they find a café and let Chika choose whatever she wanted. Chika hovered by the counter, pressing her face closer to the glass to better inspect the delicacies on display.
"She's not the type to say something," she heard Rinji say behind her. "It's a little troublesome, but Chika is an adorable child who can be forgiven for more things than you or I."
"Rinji…" Osamu reproached carefully.
Privately, Chika thought this was a silly lesson. That said, the Mont Blanc bears in the case did look rather tasty. A pair of perfectly round ears, and an adorably neutral face with strategically piped details in the eye to give it a facsimile of life. Small animals have always been a weakness of hers.
She'd start with the ears first. Make her way across the face, saving the last quarter for her brother, who would graciously clean the plate of even the tiniest speck of cream. Osamu would politely deny a taste, though his eyes would linger.
That too was a lesson. It felt uncomfortable to know that Rinji thought he needed to teach them about regret.
"Chika," said Rinji's warm, reliable voice, "—is Osamu your friend?"
"Is he yours?"
He laughed in that particular way of his.
They walked home together after dropping Osamu off, hand in hand. It was raining now, and Rinji's left shoulder was damp as they trudged through the streets with a purple-and-pink umbrella—the one with little polka dots and a clear, transparent base.
Chika thought about it even though she already knew her answer. "I'd like him to be."
Her heart thumped, almost thrilled as she glanced at him to see how he would react. His lips twitched into a smile. "What a troublesome little sister," he said, heartbreakingly fond. He pulled her a little closer to his side, fingers tightening just a little. Were he a kinder brother, he might have trembled a little as he did. "You will make me go grey in three years' time."
"I don't think that's my fault."
"So you can be nuanced about guilt."
"I know you," Chika said, leaning into his side and closing her eyes. "No one can make you do something that you didn't already want to do. You're too smart to be any other way."
"Being troublesome must run in the family."
"Osamu-kun is troublesome, too. In his own way." They stepped through their doors, Rinji shaking out the umbrella outside as Chika headed in to take off her boots. She looked back and saw him there, hair clumped in dirt-brown strands from all the water that he had allowed himself to collect. "Is that why you want me to keep an eye on him?"
"It would make me feel better if you guys could take care of each other," he said. "I'm in college now. I don't have as much time on my hands to babysit either of you."
Chika turned away. "I can manage on my own."
"I figured you would say that," Rinji said. Whatever face he made was between him and the deluge of rain that blurred much of this memory with the second of May. "That's just the type of person you are."
Their mother cooked rice that night. Chika ate until she was full, and her brother carried her off to bed when she dozed on the couch as he read through a book of maps, drawing lines over the old streets of Mikado City that hadn't been used since the Invasion.
—·—
(The day after her brother went missing, she woke up in pain.
A tired, bone-deep ache that infiltrated every limb and felt as raw-red as the undersides of her eyes. She walked into her brother's room and curled up on the rug he had been meaning to swap out for something that fit his room better. He was no longer a teenager whose personality revolved around liking the colour blue. He was an adult, he liked to say, with more mature tastes and habits. He had plans. He had things he had wanted to do.
Across the room, there were a couple of books stacked by his desk. She could barely make out the words on their spines. It was too dark in the temporal hours between night and dawn.
He liked to dog-ear his books. Tuck the corners down into perfect little triangles. Sharp, aligned, and pressed so flat you could hardly notice he was the type of person who did that.
In a couple of years, they might have been passed on to Osamu.
When her parents came in to start cleaning the dust off and putting the more painful items in storage, they noticed the missing rug and said little about where it ended up.)
—·—
It took Osamu three full months to admit he had joined Border.
His hands twisted the strap of the bag he slung across his chest, but his eyes were unwavering. They didn't look away even though she knew he wanted to. Even though she wanted him to as well.
A part of her wondered if he really needed someone to look after him, but she remembered how he didn't even think before kneeling against the same rough asphalt, pulling out supplies without any care for the dirt staining his pants. He was kinder than either Amatori, and she was horribly jealous that it came so easily without any predefined thought.
"Are you having fun?" she asked softly.
Both of them flinched.
It was not a question she would have asked normally, but she had lived with Amatori Rinji longer than he had.
"I didn't join Border to have fun," Osamu said after a moment. There was a small drop of cold sweat on his cheek, his lips white from the pressure of holding them flat and thin. "I—"
"—did it for yourself," she finished. He frowned. Chika felt a little happy being so bold and even happier to see Osamu on the back foot after her interruption. Rinji once described her as a field of flowers that could lure bees to ensure their own survival, smiling as he pet her hair. "Your mother told me about it…She asked me to convince you to quit."
Osamu grimaced, cheeks flushed. "I'm sorry…" His thumb ran over the stitch line on his straps. From this close, Chika could see how the middle threads were more worn under his thumb and finger. A couple of frays branching out in charcoal black strands. "I don't intend to stop, however."
"Is it hard?"
"A little," he admitted. The blush worsened into a deeper red. "I'm not sure how much I can speak about it openly, but training is…taking time."
Chika tried to imagine Osamu with a gun. Mikado citizens were remarkably acclimated to the sight of children carrying firearms around on their persons. It wasn't hard for her to superimpose one of the large rifles she's seen Arashiyama Squad apparate the few times they had to bail mid-interview to answer a Gate alert. She'd even seen their swords from her little hiding places in the Forbidden Zone, crouched by a broken window and mind empty of even the concept of panic.
Nothing she imagined fit him, but neither did the frustration in his brow, creasing his skin and darkening the bags under his eyes.
(How would it feel to hold one herself? Did Border Triggers have weight to them the same way she imagined the real things would? There were children even younger than her swinging swords around like they were nothing, fluttering around in lightning-fast sweeps through the hard shell of the long-necked monsters that turned their entire world upside down.)
Eventually, Chika just smiled. It was easier to be gentle that way, she found. Any other type of kindness was ill-suited to her composition. "Do your best, Osamu-kun."
He didn't smile, but his eyes were shining. "Thank you, Chika," he said sincerely.
A part of that touched her. Like springwater on a hot evening, the rush of a creek over broken bits of stone and old shrines to spirits.
The rest ran like bitter medicine, burning the whole way down as she swallowed the thought of Osamu slipping through like the better people that had gone before him.
Take care of him, Rinji said.
She did not sleep well for a long time.
—·—
Things happened very fast after that. Yūma, Replica, Miwa—Jin.
She watched as Jin took Osamu and Yūma to talk to the Director, leaving her and Usami alone in the main living space. Usami's eyes were bright behind her glasses, seeming to catch onto an unspoken order.
Perhaps even unnoticed, too. It seemed to be too perfect now that her main detractor was being escorted out of the room, and a rich source of usually confidential information brimmed with excitement right in front of her.
"Usami-san," Chika started softly, hands clutching the hem of her skirt. "Can you tell me a bit about Border?"
"I thought you'd never ask!" Usami cried, sitting close enough that their knees could knock together. "Let me start with the basics, and you can just stop and ask when you want more details, alright? I don't want to overwhelm you and scare you off after all the work Jin must have gone through to recruit you." She smiled, and it felt so kind. "How does that sound?"
Osamu would not like this.
Her parents would not like this.
Even she didn't like this, hand reflexively resting on her heart to soothe the pang bristling through her chest. It was a little hard to breathe, but everything felt so right in that moment. She bit her lip and let the pain cut through the buzzing nerves.
"That sounds perfect," she said carefully, enunciating every word. Her smile wobbled a little at the end, but her hands were still and her body on its way to finding a familiar pillar of calm. She let go of her skirt, no longer needing its anchor. "Please tell me all that you can."
Usami pushed her glasses up and got to work.
—·—
That first night at Tamakoma, she stayed up with Yūma to help him with his application forms while Osamu spoke with Director Rindō some more.
Replica hovered nearby, and Chika valiantly resisted the urge to ask to pet his little ear-like apparatus.
"Your language is confusing," Yūma sighed, tongue sliding to the corner of his mouth as he concentrated hard on the strokes of his characters. The mechanical pencil helped him deliver crisp lines, but his sense of space was all over the place. "I can already tell your 'school' is going to be tough."
"But you're even more tough," Chika said, writing out the next line in large, obvious print for him to copy. She twisted a strand of her hair between her fingers and hummed. "Osamu-kun told me about your first day in class and everything that happened afterwards."
Yūma's pen stilled. "Osamu told you that?"
She tucked the hair behind her ear. "It took a little convincing," Chika said meekly. "I think it was more for my benefit than anything else. He really wanted me to agree to meet you."
For a long time, Yūma didn't blink. Actually, thinking about it now, Chika wasn't sure if he had blinked at all in the time that they've known each other. He's closed his eyes in thought, and they would crescent and thin with different expressions, but they never blinked. No involuntary movements. No wasted gestures. Efficiency taken to its sharpest extreme and folded over into layers of habit that must have felt so natural at this point in time.
"Chika," Yūma said, his voice as clear as a bell, "—you're pretty smart. Whoever raised you must have been a scary person."
"No," she smiled. "Not to me."
Yūma shivered, probably for dramatic effect. "There you go again."
"I'm not doing anything, though?"
"Ack!" The pencil dropped from his hand, and Chika wondered if this was an elaborate excuse to stop and take a break from the tedium. "Just ask what you want to ask! I'd tell you anything you anyway—it'd be too troublesome to keep it all a secret."
The giggle burst from her without permission, and Chika looked as shocked as she felt hearing the unbidden sound. At Yūma's curious look, she said "My brother once called me a troublesome child."
"Yūgo often said the same thing about Yūma," Replica mused. He hovered near the form they had yet to finish signing, and Yūma rolled his eyes before picking the pencil up again. Chika made sure they completed the last of the signatures before her placid smile dropped, and she confronted the weight in her stomach that had been there since the day she found out Osamu had joined Border.
"If Osamu-kun were to go to the other side, what would happen to him?"
"It depends," Yūma said, finger on his chin. He leaned back on the cushions of Tamakoma's couch, his small frame being dwarfed by the hand-me-down teal. "Are we talking about an expedition or something else?"
Chika played with the edges of her own forms, curling the corners and nearly pressing down to create dog ears. "My friend and brother were kidnapped."
"Ah," said Yūma. Then, blunt as a rock, he made sure she was looking at him before telling her, "He'd be killed, of course. He's not worth capturing alive."
It went quiet.
Yūma reached out, and Replica landed in the cup of his hand, settling with a soft, alien hum. Trion soldiers never hummed the same way human electronics did. It was like a song without a rhythm. Noise strung together with fractals. "It'd be his own fault, though," Yūma continued softly. "Everything else was. I told him he'd die, but he still went ahead with everything, even knowing that."
"That's the type of person he is," Chika said wryly. After a moment's consideration, she eventually smoothed over the curled documents and tried to reverse the worn edge.
"And what about you?"
Chika stilled.
"Are you the type of person to allow that to happen?"
Through considerable effort, Chika pried her jaw loose from its rust. "I wouldn't want to be." Nausea built up in her throat, and she swallowed it down, looking down to hide behind her bangs. "But…"
Take care of each other.
Osamu was probably beside himself with worry, but he wouldn't actually trample over her desire to join Border. Not if she told him plainly and clearly that this was something she wanted to do. And that is exactly what had happened. She stood her ground, and he adapted to facilitate her silly request.
He probably had his own curse handed down to him by Rinji. She wondered if it was as complicated as hers. Taking care of Osamu was easy. He was stubborn, but he loved her in his own way and felt responsible now that he was the only person in her life left who was willing to do something.
Now there were two of them. There had always been two of them. Chika had her own hands and her own two feet, after all. It felt weird to remind herself of that, but you could really be taught anything in life.
Her head shot up, the rebellious strand of hair atop her head bouncing with the movement. "Yūma-kun?"
Yūma smiled. "Yeah, Chika?"
"I'll teach you how to ride a bike," she took a deep breath, "—so in return, can you teach me more about your father's three lessons?"
"There's not much more to it. I already told you what you needed to know." Yūma's hand spun the ring on his finger. "And besides, the one person he taught them to followed those lessons to his death."
"But you're still here," said Chika. It felt important to let him know that, despite the fact that she of all people understood how deeply that hurt to acknowledge. Replica's unchanging eyes seemed to weigh her up. "Osamu-kun told me a little about it."
"Both of you have been raised by a schemer." Despite his words, Yūma seemed to laugh even if he didn't make a single sound. Breathing also seemed optional, it seemed. It hurt her pride that she was only noticing all of this now.
Yūma sighed, heavy and reluctant. "Alright, fine. I agree to your terms, Amatori Chika."
They shook hands over their application forms, and somehow, both of them found a real smile to show each other.
The future seemed so possible, then. For the first time, Chika wondered what it had in store and found herself wanting to find out.